We all have obligations and deadlines. But hurry and extreme future-mindedness impoverish the present. What we value most is love, friendship, solace, beauty and humor. Yet these things are best appreciated or communicated face to face in a calm, relaxed setting.

Slowing down enhances your sense of gratitude, improves your mental and physical health, allows you to gain control of your life, lets you appreciate beauty, and enables you to reconnect with those around you.

Sometimes the best way to spend a day is simply savoring what you have before it’s gone.”

The world is changing faster than ever before, and we are flooded by impossible amounts of data, of ideas, of promises and of threats. Humans relinquish authority to the free market, to crowd wisdom and to external algorithms partly because they cannot deal with the deluge of data. In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don’t know what to pay attention to, and they often spend their time investigating and debating side issues. In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.”

Where some people have a self, most people have a void, because they are too busy in wasting their vital creative energy to project themselves as this or that, dedicating their lives to actualizing a concept of what they should be like rather than actualizing their potentiality as a human being, a sort of “being” vs. having — that is, we do not “have” mind, we are simply mind. We are what we are.”

Whether you are looking at the big picture or the little picture, it is important to remember that what you see is only a very small part of the whole thing. And the picture is likely to be distorted in many different ways.

The media, the financial industry, regulators – all have their own agenda, motivations, and favored narratives. What we see has already been refracted through several lenses. But the most dangerous distortions appear in the light we bend ourselves to fit our own prejudices, delusions, and desires.”

A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped … The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel than an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it.”